I'm using a service (CMS/Host) called SquareSpace to host my site, and today I'm registering the domain for it. Basically, how do I make it so when somebody types www.tedxoxford.com it points at http://www.tedxoxford.com/landing (currently http://tedxoxford.squarespace.com/landing) instead of the default index? Is this possible? Squarespace is quite a restricted CMS and means that your logos etc all point to the index so I don't want people ending up on my landing/splash page every time they want the home page, only on the first time they type in the URL.

A dirty hack would be to check the refferer and redirect anyone hitting the index to the landing page, but that's a lot of loading overhead I'd rather avoid...

Are you registering the domain with squarespace or someone else? I suspect the best way to get your answer though, will be to ask squarespace support, as they are the ones who will need to make the redirect happen.
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paulmorrissMar 3 '11 at 15:25

2 Answers
2

This will force a redirect from / to /landing every time. Place it in a file called .htaccess and place it in your root web directory:

redirect 301 / /redirect
redirect 301 /index.php /redirect

If you want them to be able to view the home page once and then redirect every time after that you'll need to use cookies and server side programming language to handle the redirect. Basically the first time they visit the index page will set a cookie with an expiration date far into the future. Then every time they revisit your site the index page will see that cookie and redirect them to the new landing page before the page loads.

If you have access to the webserver settings you can make a setting change there to add other homepage file names such as index.php, home.html, etc. Adding this change will lead the webserver to look (in the order they appear in the setting) to find these files in each folder to deplay by default when referencing a folder not a file in a web address. Also you might look into .htaccess files as I think you can make this same change on a per-folder basis using these kinds of files if you don't have access to the server setting setup.